Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urged US President Donald Trump to delay a planned strike on Iran in part out of concern that Israeli missile defense systems were overstretched, CNN reported overnight Thursday.
According to the report, Israeli officials warned that the Zionist entity’s air defense systems had been used extensively during last year’s war on Iran and that ‘Israel’ did not believe the Iranian regime would collapse quickly without a prolonged military campaign.
That assessment was one of several factors that led Trump to postpone an attack that many in ‘Israel’ and abroad had expected to take place between Wednesday and Thursday night.
CNN said Trump surprised allies after a series of hawkish statements by declaring that the killing of protesters in Iran “had stopped.”
Administration officials told Gulf states that Trump’s primary objective was to pressure Tehran to halt the alleged crackdown and that he was looking for concrete signs of such a shift.
Concerns over Israeli missile interceptor stockpiles have surfaced before. Even prior to the latest developments in Iran, reports spoke of a “severe shortage” of interceptors in the Zionist entity — claims the Israeli government has denied. The United States has also reportedly struggled to replenish its own interceptor reserves after supplying ‘Israel’ during the fighting.
The Netanyahu–Trump conversation took place Wednesday, according to Israeli and US media reports. Netanyahu pressed Trump not to strike Iran at this stage. CNN, other outlets and ynet military analyst Ron Ben-Yishai have reported that Israeli leaders doubted limited strikes would be sufficient to bring down the Iranian regime.
Ben-Yishai wrote that from Israeli perspective, the timing was unfavorable. Officials in the Zionist entity, as well as in other Middle Eastern capitals, “feared that an attack might fail to topple the regime while exacting a heavy price on Israel’s home front and imposing enormous economic and security costs from another prolonged confrontation with Iran — one for which Israel was not fully prepared.”
Ben-Yishai added that Iran was itself under intense pressure and on high alert, heightening Israeli concerns about a possible Iranian response.